Ralph Nader’s green bananas

BY THE zany sartorial standards that prevail on the Santa Monica boardwalk, a man wearing a cardboard box daubed with the words “Big Hotel” barely merits a second glance. The pantomime staged outside one of Los Angeles' ritzier hotels by left-wingers protesting against the low wages paid to chambermaids was passionate enough. But it did not distract the muscle-heads swinging on the nearby parallel bars. When Ralph Nader, the Green Party's probable presidential candidate, rose to speak, the most conspicuous outsider he attracted was a heckling drunk.

A slightly scruffy sideshow is just what left-wing activism looks like to the political establishment in Washington, DC, at the moment. Bill Clinton ushered the China trade bill through Congress by a surprisingly large majority of 40 votes, despite relentless opposition from the AFL-CIO, the country's largest trade-union organisation and one of the building blocks of the Democratic Party. Even the rowdier forms of activism that wrecked the Seattle trade talks last year look as if they are running out of steam: the repeat performance in Washington in April failed to close down the joint meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Yet from the perspective of Southern California, the idea that the left is on the march again looks a little less zany. The body builders might have paid scant attention, but the campaign to institute a minimum “liveable wage” for workers in Santa Monica's hotels and restaurants has so rattled local business owners that they have started their own petition for a rival “living wage” law. The aim of this week's demonstration was to point out that this was not good enough: there were too many loopholes for the businesses.

More generally, labour activism is on a roll in Southern California—galvanised by the union bosses dropping their opposition to immigration. This year has already seen one big success: a popular strike for better wages by janitors, 98% of whom were Latinos. Mexico has a strong union tradition in which noisy strikes and demonstrations are routine. Last year home-care workers in the region became unionised, proving that unions can reach out to a highly dispersed workforce. The cheering chambermaids of Santa Monica were joined at their rally by placard-waving comrades from the Screen Actors Guild, currently striking over pay for commercials reshown on cable television (a strike that is costing the entertainment industry $1m a day).

And there is Mr Nader. A craggy figure in a battered suit, the perennial hero of consumer-rights crusades is also on a roll. The Green Party is scoring about 5% in nationwide polls, but 9% in California. A pool-side fundraising party after the union rally pulled in a string of $2,000 contributions from a Hollywood crowd, edging the campaign a little closer to its goal of $5m. A few years ago, Mr Nader seemed something of a relic—the man who made cars safer and then seemed to go slightly bonkers about trade. Now he seems ahead of the curve—one of the first people, for instance, to argue that Microsoft was a monopoly and needed to be broken up; one of the strongest supporters of widescale campaign-finance reform; and, from some perspectives, the godfather of all the non-governmental organisations.

Another California maverick, Jerry Brown, sounded some of these themes in 1992. So far Mr Nader can claim slightly more success in terms of the great challenge of the left in America—bringing the movement together. Ever since the 1960s, when the Vietnam demonstrations pitted blue-collar workers against university radicals, who not only wheedled their way out of fighting for their country, but even spat on returning heroes, the left has had a class problem. In Seattle, tree-hugging environmentalists marched alongside car workers. John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO, did his bit by sending out organisers to college campuses to fan the flames of protest against “sweat-shop” employers. But most of the organisation for Seattle seemed to come from the NGOs—and from the Naderite Public Citizen organisation in particular.

For Mr Nader, this new coalition is a logical result of money politics. When money alone buys access to politicians, he says, civil society starts to shut down. The triumph of global capitalism over social equity is creating an alliance between all sorts of people who have previously been at odds. The alternative for voters is “the pro-life corporate party or the pro-choice corporate party”, “George W. Bush, he of the oil industry”, or “Albert Gore, he who doesn't know his own identity”.

Mr Nader's immediate challenge is to clinch the Green Party nomination at its convention on June 24th. (His rivals are Jello Biafra, a punk rocker campaigning to abolish the army and introduce a maximum wage, and Stephen Gaskin, a hippie campaigning to legalise marijuana.) Providing he can overcome this little local difficulty, his next target is to secure 5% of the vote in the presidential election, thus winning federal funding for a campaign in 2004, and thereby laying the foundation for a viable third party.

Not a large target—yet one that could have a profound effect on Mr Gore's chances. Mr Nader says that he attracted only three Democrats for every two Republicans in the 1996 race (when he did not actively campaign). That looks far too balanced a split. Already Democrat bosses are waking up to the idea that, in a tight race, Green votes could swing some states for the Republicans. Even in California, strong support for the Greens in the latest polls means that Mr Gore's lead over Mr Bush has narrowed. At the very least Mr Nader could force Mr Gore to throw money at races which he would otherwise take for granted.

This presents a problem for the Democrats. But it also presents a problem for Mr Nader's new left coalition. Mr Nader says that “we owe Gore nothing”, reeling off the subjects on which the environmentalist left feels betrayed by the Clinton-Gore administration, from automobile safety and fossil fuels to biotechnology and forestry. But the labour unions in particular want Mr Gore to win. If Mr Nader delivers victory to the party least sympathetic to the left, it is hard to believe he will not run into all sorts of problems with Mr Sweeney—not to mention Messrs Biafra and Gaskin.